Primary care patients and general practice in NSW will be worse off than the rest of Australia if a proposed payroll tax on GPs in enforced, the Primary Care Business Council (PCBC) has warned.
PCBC spokesperson Dr Hamish Meldrum called on the NSW Government to provide a retrospective amnesty to payroll tax to ensure GPs aren’t forced to pay years in back taxes which would bankrupt some operators.
“GP practices are paying payroll tax like any other business, and they pay this on administration staff, nurses and training doctors. However, the possible extension of payroll tax to distributions to contract GP’s will be significant and this tax will need to be passed onto patients,” Dr Meldrum said.
“The NSW Government needs to act now to ensure general practices are not unfairly burdened by a payroll tax which could threaten their very existence and result in more pressure on the public health system.”
If the GP payroll tax if applied to all distributions to contact doctors, it could result in fee increases of between $10 – $20 per appointment. “The Federal Government has supported primary care with an increased bulk billing incentive to assist GPs to bulk bill vulnerable patients. But payroll tax has the potential to reverse any gains,” Dr Meldrum said.
“It would also have the added cost of pushing more patients towards hospital emergency departments which are already over stretched.”
PCBC modelling indicates that NSW could see more than 1,000,000 more patients present to NSW emergency departments instead of visiting a GP because of increased fees. This would result in an additional annual cost of more than $680 million, which would far outweigh the revenue from payroll tax of around $130 million.
“General Practice has been poorly funded for some decades, and it makes no sense to impose a fiscally destructive tax on a primary care system that is already under strain. Doctors won’t be able to cope and ultimately it will be patients who suffer the most,” Dr Meldrum said.
“If you get sick once a year and see your GP you pay the tax once and if you are sick ten times a year and have ten GP visits then you pay the tax ten times. This is a very regressive tax.
“It is disappointing that the NSW Government has not engaged with GP operators particularly when practice viability is at risk – in the last 12 months 184 practices in 17 Public
Health Network sites closed their doors – many more will close if this tax is imposed. “I urge the NSW Government to step back from the edge and engage with the sector to ensure we have a viable General Practice sector going forward.”
Skip to content